precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer.
Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood."
This book was difficult. Difficult to read, and even more difficult to determine how I felt at the end.
How do you best write about a fictional love affair between a teacher and a 15-year-old student that is actually a predatory relationship? There are no easy answers to that question but that is what happens in My Dark Vanessa which alternates between 2000 and 2017 as we see how Vanessa Wye is groomed and then raped by her teacher Jacob Strane. We see the repercussions she must deal with as an adult who does not allow herself to realize that the relationship was, in fact abusive. We see how a child is forced to carry the responsibility the adults around her should have assumed themselves. The delicate and fraught nature of adolescence is captured well.
This book is definitely very, very well-written and the first half is well paced. There is a strong sense of place— the landscape, the sparseness. The prose is tight and careful, intimate and descriptive. The protagonist, Vanessa, is fully realized and the author does a good job of showing Vanessa’s struggle to face what she experienced. Her point of view and how it shifts over time is expertly managed and feels honest. You see how pernicious this kind of abuse is because it makes Vanessa doubt herself and lose herself and see herself, rather than the predator, as the problem. There is an interesting and relentlessly claustrophobic quality to the prose. You want to escape the quiet horror of Vanessa’s story while also wanting to see how it all ends, if she is going to be okay. You want there to be a freeing moment of clean air without knowing if you will get it.
There is some interesting cultural context developed through pop culture references, Lolita, and the #MeToo movement. I suspect we are going to see quite a few novels doing this over the next several years as writers try to distill into fiction what has been happening culturally with regard to sexual violence. There were ways the people in Vanessa’s life responded to her that were infuriating and inadequate and that is, all too often, how these things go.
The book does run too long. After about 250 pages, there is a thematic repetition that doesn’t serve the novel well. Vanessa bites her cheek constantly. It’s like, girl, is there anything left on the inside of your mouth??? Vanessa is fully realized but most of the other characters don’t get as much depth, though they really should.
The real challenge I had with this book is that at times, the abuse felt romanticized, eroticized. It gave me pause. As a mature reader, the way the relationship is described is quietly horrifying. However I am unsure if a less mature reader would fully pick up on the horror. As the novel goes on there were so many rape scenes (and I will always call it rape because that’s what it was), that it just felt… somewhat gratuitous. And, I suspect, that’s kind of the point, that Vanessa, particularly at fifteen, was torn between love and repulsion, that she was shaped into someone who would see the situation as romantic while, with the distance as readers, we understand the situation as appalling. Strane is clearly a horrible piece of shit. Russell makes that crystal clear. But… I don’t know. Does she go far enough?
My Dark Vanessa is certainly not an easy book and I get why some readers have found it to be over the top regarding the descriptions of abuse that the main character faces. I don’t share that same opinion entirely, but there were moments when I questioned the sheer number of rape scenes that Kate Elizabeth Russell chose to include, and/or the gratuitous level of detail they held; because even without explicitly showing the brutal assaults on Vanessa’s autonomy, her “relationship” with Strane was awful and his paedophilia was always obvious to the reader, as was its effect on 15 y/o Vanessa.
Age Rating 18+. The highest rating I think I have ever given a book. This is certainly not appropriate for younger readers.
